Kundera, prophet of social networks – 07/12/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

“For each of us suffers from the idea of ​​disappearing, unheard and unnoticed, into an indifferent universe, and therefore wants, while there is still time, to transform himself into his own universe of words”, wrote Milan Kundera.

The great Czech writer who had his death announced early this Wednesday (12), at the age of 94, came to know very well that he managed to be “heard and noticed” in our “indifferent universe”, transforming himself into “his own universe of words”.

When he wrote the reflection that opens this column, it was not possible to be so sure. The paragraph above is from “The Book of Laughter and Forgetfulness” (Companhia das Letras, translation by Teresa Bulhões da Fonseca), published in 1978.

At that point, the author was living his first years of exile in Paris, where he had moved in 1975. The explosion of “The Unsustainable Lightness of Being”, an atomic bestseller that made his name known throughout the world, would only occur in 1984 .

Kundera was the son of the spirit of 1968 and the most famous translator, in artistic language, of the Prague Spring, a broad movement of insubordination in Czech society for a socialism with more freedom — and, in equal measure, also of the violence that put a dismal end to the party, when Soviet tanks entered the city.

The years of repression that followed cost him his teaching job and even his citizenship, but they provided him with material for his fictions full of eroticism, acid humor and a painfully concrete sense of historical contingencies.

Kundera asserted emphatically that he was not a psychological novelist. A fictionalist of ideas, in addition to being an essayist and thinker of literature, he produced, in particular, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetfulness”, with its playful mixture of genres, a set of reflections more relevant than the stories narrated there.

The balcony that opens this column in the form of homage is unfolded in the book, in the typical kunderian fashion, in lucidity, comedy and pessimism:

“A person who writes books is everything (a unique universe for himself and everyone else) or nothing”, he notes. “And because it will never be given to anyone to be everything, we all who write books are nothing. We are unknown, jealous, sour, and we wish the death of the other.”

I think few writers would admit there was a deep grain of truth in such words—in public, that is. Kundera never shirks those unflattering abysses into which our species vertigo contemplates.

The next, unappealable step is that, if writers are jealous, their uneasiness can only get worse when they see the category multiplying around them.

“The irresistible proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, pregnant women, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, mayors, doctors and the sick demonstrates to me that every man, without exception, carries within himself his potential. of a writer, so that the whole human species could with every right go out into the street and shout: We are all writers!”

From this grumpy comedy scene, then, there is an impressive kind of prophecy. It does not seem absurd to say that, in 1978, Kundera predicted the internet and social networks when he wrote the following:

“When one day (this will happen soon) every man wakes up as a writer, the time of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.”

And has it not arrived? Rest in peace, Milan Kundera. Thank you for everything.

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